We are looking for a solution to automatically shutdown server room equipment in a controlled process, based on priority, automatically during a power outage and on demand if necessary. We would also like to be able to power the servers back on in a controlled manor.
We have a mixture of equipment (physical and virtual servers and multiple types of UPS/storage array/server vendors) and no budget for this :-) so even a partial solution would be helpful. We hope to get a generator but we have been hoping for years now.
Stop hoping, start planning & budgeting. To shutdown, you could write a simple script to call psexec, WMI, etc. Most good UPSes come with software to gracefully shutdown the attached computer. To turn on, you either need WoL, or a hardware solution like IPMI (iLO, ILOM, etc).
We have a mixed Windows/*nix environment and have been dealing with the same issues. We're in the process of implementing apcupsd and using it to kick off .bat and shell scripts to shut things down gracefully. So far it seems to work very well across the disparate server environments and UPS systems.